Fitness For Freedom Tips

Fitness For Freedom Tips is a new type of fitness and health show. We deliver fitness tips that you can apply to your life right away in 10 minutes or less. Lets face it you’re busy and life pulls you in all directions. You want to be healthier, but living a healthier lifestyle is hard. It requires you to change and there is a lot of misinformation out there. We work hard to syphon through it to give you the most sound advice possible and set you up for the greatest chance of success.
Jonathan Chant has been working with people to live healthier lives for 10 years now and he’s seen it all. That’s why he founded Fitness For Freedom, your complete online fitness training and lifestyle design community. He pulls out all the stops to help you make the changes yourself. No transformation challenges, no extreme changes just solid strategies to help you make changes that will stick for the rest of your life.
Change is constant and you’re going to have lots of questions as you go along that’s why we keep our episodes short so they don’t ‘eat in’ to your already ‘stretched’ lives (puns intended).
We try to have some fun with it too!
Exercise doesn’t have to be boring?
So what are you waiting for? If you’re still reading this you’re definitely interested in the show, so give it a listen.

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So do you have to eliminate carbohydrates to lose weight, the short answer to this is no way and anyone that says otherwise is ignorant to the science behind weight loss and may or may not have alternative motives to try and sell you something like a book. I can say this with 100% certainty, because I lost 30 lbs. over the last 5 years and 60% of my caloric intake comes from carbohydrates

Today’s question is really basic, but there are a couple of possible answers because it depends on a few factors. The first thing I want to throw out is unless you are an elite or professional athlete where every calorie you eat is being accounted for and you’re on a very strict exercise routine you do not need to eat directly after a workout for quote ’recovery purposes’. For the average person it will make no difference at all, how you recover depends a lot more on what you eat for the rest of the day and how much sleep you get at night.

Brenda thank you for sending this question, it’s an important one that I should have answered right on the show.We’ll start with this one, how do you find your race pace? The one problem with race pace is that it can be hard to figure out

Dr. James Levine is a renowned medical doctor and researcher in nutrition and metabolism. He is the inventor of the treadmill desk and has authored several books including the one we’re talking about today, ‘Get Up!’. Dr. Levine’s ‘tongue in cheek’ style is both entertaining and hard hitting.

All this to be said you can’t just say strength training or cardiovascular training burns more calories than the other because it depends on a lot of factors.It depends how high your heart rate goes, when you strength train it depends how long your breaks are, it depends if you do compound movements or isolated ones, it depends if you go to your max. If you’re doing cardiovascular training it depends how much resistance there is, I mean are you biking up the hill or down it?

Now I want to talk about some things that might make you feel like you’re taking control and responsibility but it is a very ineffective way to do it.What many people do is they recognize that they need to take responsibility which is the needed first step. For some people that means, going out to buy a gym membership, ordering some in-home fitness equipment, hiring a personal trainer to work with them or maybe signing up for a club like Weight Watchers. For many people this is a good first step and is required, except what you’ve done is gone out and bought the tool first.

The first question you need to ask yourself is why are you exercising? If you're exercising just to be healthier and to live a longer life you probably don't need to feel sore. Around the world there are pockets of populations called blue zones where they have high percentages of people that live to be over the age of 100 and one of the things that every one of these populations has in common is they do over an hour a day of moderate exercise plus they have lots of low level activities built into their everyday lives but not enough that they ever feel sore. These people are over 100 and a lot of them live relatively independently with family, so they’re well enough to still do chores and more or less take care of themselves.

Getting a stitch in your side can be really discouraging because it hurts a lot and can make you want to stop, which is the worst thing you can do, if you stop running or walking every time you get a stitch you will never be able to break through that barrier. Getting a stitch in your side when running is very common, especially when you haven't exercised in a while.

This is good for a couple of reasons, one, it means that the sugar you just consumed is used as energy right away, so it completely skips the storage stage in your body which means it has no chance of becoming fat and your body produces less insulin, so your cells sensitivity to insulin stays high meaning your body needs to produce less insulin in the future to keep your blood sugar levels normal, which means you significantly decrease your chances of getting Type 2 diabetes.

‘Well we just eat healthy food.’ and this is the problem most people have almost no idea what healthy food actually is. It’s not your fault you don’t know what healthy food is, it’s almost impossible to figure it out because the media writes headlines and articles to sell you magazines and to get you to spend more time on their website.Also there is a difference between eating food that is considered healthy or healthier and food that actually has less calories or sugar or fat in it.

We live in a forward dominant world.What I mean by this is most people work at a desk which means they’re reaching forward all the time at work, many people drive a car where they’re reaching forward on the steering wheel, even if you have an active job where you’re on your feet and moving around you will spend most of your day reaching forward because usually the work that needs to be done is right in front of you. So if you live a life where you’re constantly forward or you’re concerned about having shoulders that round forward your exercise program needs to reflect that to counter balance it. When you're doing your exercise program you should do at least 2 but probably 3 pulling exercises per 1 pushing exercise.

Today I’m going to share a recent experience I had with a client about a missed opportunity she had, to learn about how to better take care of her body.This is not about fitness per-say, but there is a good life lesson packed in here.

Language used during self talk is more powerful than you probably realize, it affects you in subconscious ways that you’re not even aware of, for example according to research out of Cornell by Brian Wansink if you go for a walk and you call it an exercise walk instead of a scenic walk you’ll eat 30% more chocolate pudding.

Before I get into the meat of this show I want you to know I am not against getting together with friends or having parties or even occasionally making regrettable food and drink choices even though it may sound like that by the end of this show. I just wan you to know that. So like I said,

I'm writing and recording this the Monday directly after Super Bowl Sunday and for me it was quite the epic weekend, where I really didn't take care of myself.

Alright Lucy thanks for this question and for me to answer it effectively it really needs to be broken down into three parts, the first part is - When should I stop exercising full stop, the second part is when should I stop but modify an exercise and then continue exercising and the third part is when is it okay to push-through the pain of an exercise? I’m going to go through these in order to hopefully clear everything up for you.you.

Nick thanks for this question, it’s an important one.If you’re listening to this show right now it means you care about your health and fitness and I want you the listener to get the most out of these episodes, it’s why we do the show the way we do.We’re doing a daily show because there is a plethora of health and fitness information to get through.

The problem is that most weekend warriors that participate in these sports use them as their exercise and they won’t do anything unless they have something to chase and someone to beat. Which means they exert themselves heavily for short bursts and do nothing the rest of the time, the problem with this is that they are not active enough through the rest of their everyday lives, which means they are actually sedentary even though they’re exercising once or twice a week, this is a problem.

Today we’re talking about lifting weights, building muscle and getting stronger. The basic premise for how you get stronger is by overloading a muscle, this is done by putting some kind of resistance on it, forcing it to recruit more muscle fibres and use more energy to overcome or at least try to overcome the load.

The thing with fat is that it takes a bit longer to turn it into energy so once you start to move or exercise your body starts to switch into burning more carbohydrates because they are more readily available, I know you want to burn more fat but it’s okay because as you move or start to exercise the percent of energy coming from fat is going down but the overall number of calories you’re burning is going up.

Like we covered in the intro we make rules for ourselves all the time, in the form of telling ourselves we’re only going to watch 1 episode only to find ourselves saying, ‘just one more episode’ but how many episodes does just one more episode turn into? and then we feel guilty about how we wasted that time or how often do you say I’m going to do my workout at lunch no matter what and then you get an ‘urgent’ matter that comes up right before your workout where you need to work through your lunch instead of taking the time to do even a short workout?

So what can we do to have better strategies to deal with the rules our lives need?

Today is a must read’s episode and we’re talking about the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Dr. Stephen R. Covey, this is not technically a fitness or health book, but more like a self help book, if I’ve learned anything in my last 10 years of teaching fitness, not exercising is a time management problem and a thinking problem, not a knowledge about fitness problem, so we’re going to focus in on that part of the book today, stick around, you’re not going to want to miss this one. Not only do we talk about the book but we give you some things you can apply to your life right away.